As with TERFs echoing right-wing pundits when it comes to trans panic, it’s so interesting to me how many aphobes and antis echo right-wing voices when it comes to moral panic over consent education and (later) age-appropriate sex education for minors. What these alt-right people are saying is so similar to shit I’ve seen aphobes say about children and sexuality, from believing that children should be kept in the dark completely about consent and anything age appropriate that might pertain to sex even a little bit, to making up strawman “translations” that misstate what sex ed advocates and consent advocates are actually saying.
None of this is surprising.
When you set up a baseline of ‘if someone claims someone is this, critical thought stops, nuance stops, human considerations stop’ the only thing you can be sure of is it will appeal to the kinds of people who don’t like nuance or humanity in the first place and they will abuse it.
Society has build a powerful direct response of grabbing pitchforks and no longer thinking for yourself at the word ‘pedophile’. Of course harmful people are abusing it.
Or should I say ‘using it’, because I have a strong suspicion that
the panicky witch-hunt sentiments behind how society deals with pedophilia were never about protecting children, and always about ‘building a tool to villify something sexual without anyone daring to criticize us because we used the p-word and no one wants to be seen defending that’.
Thank you for articulating something that’s incredibly important.
I still remember when society considered “homo” to be synonymous with “pedo” to be synonymous with “predator”, and I’m not that old. It’s not that hard to slide back. Hell, schoolteachers still get fired for being gay. It feels more and more like the endgame of all of this is a return to the level of homophobia and transphobia we’ve seen in past decades, (maybe with an in-built exception for monogamously married vanilla gays), and it’s incredibly disturbing to watch young LGBTQ* people buying into it – like watching them dig their own graves.
Alt-Right Mob Falsely Accuses Teen Vogue Of ‘Normalizing’ Pedophilia
QueerAnarchism 